"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland,
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island,
Who rules the World-Island and the various Choke points commands the world"
"Force does not reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary,it invests the victims with patience"
Honesty, integrity, ethics, morality, Truth just might be a more effective path to real Justice.
USA is yet much too drunk of its own illusions to see the writings on the walls Worldwide.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Time to Face the Truth About Iran...

Time to Face the Truth About Iran...

by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett;

Fifty years ago, during the Cuban missile crisis, the
United States faced what is frequently described as the defining challenge of
the Cold War. Today, some argue that America is facing a similarly defining
challenge from Iran’s nuclear activities. In this context, it is striking to
recall President John Kennedy’s warning, proffered just months before the
missile crisis, that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie --
deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive
and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We
subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the
comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Half a century later,
Kennedy’s warning applies all too well to America’s discussion -- it hardly
qualifies as a real debate -- about how best to deal with the Islamic Republic
of Iran.

For more than thirty years, American analysts and policy-makers
have put forward a series of myths about the Islamic Republic: that it is
irrational, illegitimate and vulnerable. In doing so, pundits and politicians
have consistently misled the American public and America’s allies about what
policies will actually work to advance US interests in the Middle East.

The most persistent -- and dangerous -- of these myths is that the
Islamic Republic is so despised by its own people that it is in imminent danger
of overthrow. From the start, Americans treated the Iranian Revolution of
1978-79 as a major surprise. But the only reason it was a surprise was that
official Washington refused to see the growing demand by the Iranian people for
an indigenously generated political order free from US domination. And ever
since then, the Islamic Republic has defied endless predictions of its collapse
or defeat.

The Islamic Republic has survived because its basic model --
the integration of participatory politics and elections with the principles and
institutions of Islamic governance and a commitment to foreign policy
independence -- is, according to polls, electoral participation rates and a
range of other indicators, what a majority of Iranians living inside the country
want. They don’t want a political order grounded in Western-style secular
liberalism. They want one reflecting their cultural and religious values: as the
reformist President Mohammad Khatami put it, “freedom, independence and progress
within the context of both religiosity and national identity.”

That’s
what the Islamic Republic, with all its flaws, offers Iranians the chance to
pursue. Even most Iranians who want the government to evolve significantly --
for example, by allowing greater cultural and social pluralism -- still want it
to be the Islamic Republic. After Iran’s 2009 presidential election, when former
Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi lost to the incumbent president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, Western elites and Iran “experts” portrayed the Green Movement that
morphed out of Mousavi’s campaign as a mass popular uprising poised to sweep
away the Islamic Republic. But the Greens, even at their height, never
represented anything close to a majority of Iranians, and within a week of the
election, their social base was already contracting. The fundamental reason was
that, after Mousavi failed to substantiate his charge of electoral fraud, the
Greens’ continued protests were no longer about a contested election, but a
challenge to the Islamic Republic itself -- for which there was only a
negligible constituency.

While many Westerners prefer to believe that
the Greens did not fade because of their own weaknesses, but because of cruel
suppression by an illegitimate regime, this does not hold up to scrutiny. In the
fifteen months preceding the shah’s 1979 departure, his troops gunned down
thousands of protesters -- and the crowds demanding his removal kept growing. In
2009, police brutality unquestionably occurred in the course of the government’s
response to post-election disturbances. The government itself acknowledged this
-- for example, by closing a prison where some detainees were physically abused
and murdered, and by indicting twelve of that prison’s personnel (two were later
sentenced to death). But fewer than 100 people died in the clashes between
demonstrators and security forces after the 2009 election, and still the Greens
retreated and their base shrank.

Western human rights groups estimate
that 4,000 to 6,000 Iranians were arrested in connection with protests following
the 2009 election. More than 90 percent were released without charge. As of
2010, Western human rights organizations did not dispute official Iranian
figures that about 250 were convicted of crimes stemming from the unrest, with
perhaps 200 other cases still pending. Most were pardoned by Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; most who were not are free on bail pending appeals.
According to a survey by Craig Charney, a former pollster for Bill Clinton and
Nelson Mandela, most Iranians saw their government’s response to the unrest as
legitimate.

Notwithstanding the Islamic Republic’s staying power,
American policy elites and Iran “experts” with no direct connection to the
on-the-ground reality inside the country continue to advance the myth of the
Islamic Republic’s illegitimacy and fragility, with the idea that if we just
believe in it enough, we will somehow sweep away the challenge Iran poses.
Today, this myth comes in two interlocking versions: that sanctions are
“working” to promote US objectives vis-à-vis Iran, and that the Arab Awakening
has left it isolated in its own neighborhood.

* * *

Many
commentators now posit that the economic hardships caused by the sanctions will
soon prompt Iranians to rise up and force fundamental change in their country --
or at least compel their government to make the concessions demanded by
Washington. But those making this argument have never explained why the economy
is so much worse today than it was in the 1980s, when Iran lost half its GDP
during the war with Iraq -- and yet even then, its population did not rise up to
force fundamental change or concessions to hostile powers.

Indeed, there
is no precedent anywhere for a sanctioned population mobilizing to
overthrow the government and replace it with one that would adopt the policies
preferred by the sanctioning foreign power. Even in Iraq, where crippling
sanctions were imposed for more than a decade, killing more than 1 million
Iraqis (half of them children), the population did not rise up to overthrow
Saddam Hussein. In the end, Saddam was displaced only by a US invasion -- and
even after that, Iraqis did not set up a pro-American, secular, liberal
government ready to subordinate Iraq’s sovereignty and national rights to
Washington’s preferences.

Last year, Western pundits hyperventilated
about “hyperinflation” in Iran, arguing that a sharp devaluation in the
country’s currency would turn the people against the government. This
assessment, like so many similar projections before it, proved fanciful. The
Iranian rial has been overvalued for more than a decade, underwriting the rising
consumption of imported goods by upper-class Iranians that has cost the economy
billions of dollars, hurt prospects for farmers and domestic manufacturers, and
constrained Iran’s non-oil exports. The recent devaluation of the rial has
aligned its nominal value with its real value; as the rial has dropped, Iran’s
non-oil exports have expanded significantly. At the same time, the government is
disbursing its foreign exchange holdings to defend a lower exchange rate for
essential imports like food and medicine.

While no one in Iran is immune
from the impact of currency devaluation, the rural poor and those involved in
export-oriented sectors are in a relatively advantageous position. There are no
discernible food shortages; stores of all sorts are fully stocked, with
significant customer traffic. Shortfalls are emerging in some imported
medicines. This, however, is not because of currency devaluation. Rather, it is
a function of the US-instigated banking sanctions that, contrary to official US
rhetoric about their “targeted” nature, make it difficult for Iranians to pay
for Western medical and pharmaceutical imports, even though selling such items
to Iran is technically allowed under US sanctions regulations. Certainly, anyone
who has walked the streets of Tehran recently (as we did in December) can see
that Iran’s economy is not collapsing, and anyone who has talked with a range of
Iranians inside the country knows that the sanctions will not compel either the
Islamic Republic’s implosion or its surrender to US demands on the nuclear
issue. There is no constituency -- among conservatives, reformists or even
what’s left of the Green Movement -- prepared to accept such an outcome.

Sanctions advocates continue to claim that it’s different this time,
partly because a “demonstration effect” from the Arab Awakening will reinforce
the impact of sanctions to break the Islamic Republic’s back. In Tehran,
however, policy-makers and analysts see the Arab Awakening as hugely positive
for the Islamic Republic’s regional position. They judge – correctly -- that any
Arab government that becomes more representative of its people’s beliefs,
concerns and preferences will be less enthusiastic about strategic
cooperation with the United States, let alone Israel, and more open to the
Islamic Republic’s message of foreign policy independence.

More
particularly, one hears in Washington that, because of the Arab Awakening,
Tehran is going to “lose Syria,” its “only Arab ally,” with dire consequences
for Iran’s regional position and internal stability. This observation
underscores just how deeply US elites are in denial about basic political and
strategic trends in the Middle East. Iranian policy-makers do not believe that
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will be overthrown (at least not by Syrians).
But even if Assad felt compelled at some point to cede Damascus, he and his
forces would almost certainly still control a significant portion of Syria.
Under these circumstances, Syria is hardly likely to become an ally of the West.
Indeed, any plausibly representative post-Assad government would not be more
pro-American or pro-Israel than the Assads have been, and it might even be less
keen about keeping Syria’s border with Israel quiet. Unless Assad were replaced
by a Taliban-like political structure -- which would be at least as
anti-American as it was anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian -- the foreign policy of
post-Assad Syria would be, on most major issues, just fine for Iran. But the US
fixation on undermining the Islamic Republic by encouraging Saudi-backed jihadis
to fight Assad will ultimately damage US security, just as US support for
Saudi-backed jihadis did in Afghanistan and Libya.

More significant,
American elites have been slow to grasp that, today, the Islamic Republic’s most
important Arab ally isn’t Syria; it’s Iraq -- the first Arab-led Shiite state in
history, an outcome made possible by the US invasion and occupation. Likewise,
America’s political class has been reluctant to acknowledge that the strategic
orientation of Egypt -- a pillar of US Middle East policy for more than thirty
years -- is now in play. While certainly not uniformly pro-Iranian, post-Mubarak
Egypt is clearly less reflexively pro-American. Before meeting with President
Obama, the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi,
traveled last year to Beijing, where he met with both outgoing President Hu
Jintao and incoming President Xi Jinping, and to Tehran, where he met with
President Ahmadinejad. Iranian military ships now go through the Suez Canal --
something that Washington could have vetoed just two years ago. Because of these
developments, Iran doesn’t “need” Syria today in the same way it once did.

American elites have a hard time facing these facts. What Washington
misses above all is that Tehran does not need Arab governments to be more
pro-Iranian; it just needs them to be less pro-America, less pro-Israel and more
independent. Because US elites miss this critical point, they miss a broader
reality as well: that the Arab Awakening is accelerating the erosion of
Washington’s strategic position in the Middle East, not Tehran’s. Rather than
deal with this, Americans continue to embrace the logic-defying proposition that
the same drivers that are empowering Islamists in Arab countries will somehow
transform the Islamic Republic into a secular liberal state.

But reality
is what it is. Consider the strategic balance sheet: on the eve of 9/11, just
over a decade ago, every Middle Eastern government -- every single one -- was
either pro-American (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf Arab
monarchies, and Tunisia), in negotiations to realign toward the United States
(Qaddafi’s Libya) and/or anti-Iranian (Saddam’s Iraq and the Taliban’s
Afghanistan). Today, the regional balance has turned decisively against
Washington and in favor of Tehran.

This has occurred not because Iran
fired a single shot, but because of elections that empowered previously
marginalized populations in Afghanistan, Egypt, Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia and
Turkey. In all of these places, governments have emerged that are no longer
reflexively pro-American and anti-Iranian. This is a huge boost to the Islamic
Republic’s strategic position.

Some commentators claim to see signals
from Iran that suggest it will finally be forced by sanctions and the Arab
Awakening to make those concessions on the nuclear issue that the United States
and Israel have long demanded. But what these commentators put forward as
evidence of imminent Iranian concessions is nothing new. Unlike others in the
Middle East, Iran was an early signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. And the Islamic Republic has for years been willing to negotiate with
America and others about their concerns over its nuclear activities -- so long
as it would not have to concede internationally recognized sovereign and treaty
rights.

In the early 2000s, the Islamic Republic negotiated with the
“EU-3” (Britain, France and Germany), suspending uranium enrichment for nearly
two years to encourage progress in the talks, at a time when it had installed
far fewer centrifuges and was enriching only at the 3 to 4 percent level
required to fuel power reactors. The United States refused to join those talks
until Tehran agreed to forsake its right to internationally safeguarded
enrichment and to dismantle its nuclear infrastructure.

In 2010, Iran
made commitments to Brazil and Turkey that it would give up most of its
then-current stockpile of 3 to 4 percent enriched uranium and, in effect, forgo
enrichment at the near 20 percent level needed to fuel a research reactor making
medical isotopes for cancer patients. In return, Tehran asked for an
internationally guaranteed fuel supply for the reactor and recognition of its
right to enrich. Once again, Washington rejected this public opening to
negotiate a meaningful nuclear deal.

Still, Iran continues to be
interested in an agreement -- perhaps one restricting its near 20 percent
enrichment in return for new fuel for its research reactor and substantial
sanctions relief or, preferably, a more comprehensive accord. In this regard,
the nuclear issue is quite simple: if the United States accepts Iran’s right to
enrich on its own territory under international safeguards, there could be a
deal -- including Tehran’s acceptance of more intrusive verification and
monitoring of its nuclear activities and limits on enrichment at the near 20
percent level.

But the Obama administration, like the Bush
administration before it, refuses to acknowledge Iran’s nuclear rights. In the
wake of Obama’s re-election, there is no evidence his administration is
rethinking that approach; senior US officials say their goal remains a
suspension of Iran’s enrichment-related activities. The administration may offer
Tehran bigger material incentives for substantial nuclear concessions (as if the
Iranians were donkeys to be manipulated with economic carrots and sticks). But
Washington remains unwilling to address the Islamic Republic’s sovereign rights
and core security concerns, for that would mean acknowledging it as a legitimate
political entity representing legitimate national interests. As long as this is
the case, there won’t be a deal.

* * *

Even if Tehran won’t
surrender to American diktats and the Islamic Republic doesn’t collapse, a
critical mass of US policy elites argue that continuing the current mix of
sanctions and faux diplomacy is worthwhile, because this will persuade Iranians,
other Middle Easterners and Americans that the failure to reach a deal is the
Iranian government’s fault. And that, it is held, will justify the ultimate
“necessity” of US military strikes.

Americans should have no illusions
about the consequences of an overt, US-initiated war against the Islamic
Republic. Using American military power to disarm another Middle Eastern state
of weapons of mass destruction it does not have, even as Washington stays quiet
about Israel’s arsenal of about 200 nuclear weapons, would elevate already high
levels of anti-American sentiment in the region, threatening our remaining
allies there and rendering their cooperation with the United States virtually
impossible. American military action against the Islamic Republic would have no
international legitimacy. The larger part of the international community (120 of
the UN’s 193 member states are part of the Non-Aligned Movement, which recently
elected the Islamic Republic as its chair) is already on record that it would
consider an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities illegal. There will be no UN
Security Council authorization for such action; Washington will have no allies
save Israel and (perhaps) Britain.

Starting a war with Iran over the
nuclear issue would ratify the US image, in the Middle East and globally, as an
outlaw superpower. This prospect is even more dangerous to America’s strategic
position today than it was after the invasion of Iraq. Just a few years ago, the
United States was still an unchallenged superpower. Other countries’ views did
not matter much; especially in the Middle East, Washington could usually impose
its requirements on compliant governments whose foreign policies were largely
unreflective of their own peoples’ opinions.

Today, as more countries
with increasingly mobilized publics seek greater independence, their views on
regional and international issues -- as well as the views of their people --
matter much more. Therein lies the real challenge posed by the Islamic Republic,
a challenge that Washington has yet to meet squarely: How does the United States
work with an Iran -- or an Egypt, for that matter -- acting to promote
its interests as it sees them, rather than as Washington defines them? America
needs better relations with Tehran to begin improving ties with the growing
number of Islamist political orders across the Middle East, which is essential
to saving what’s left of the US position in the region. It also needs Tehran’s
help to contain the rising tide of jihadi terrorism in the region -- a
phenomenon fueled by Saudi Arabia and Washington’s other ostensible Arab allies
in the Persian Gulf. Iran is a critical player for shaping the future not only
of Iraq and Afghanistan, but Syria as well. More than ever before, American
interests require rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. Continued US
hostility only courts strategic disaster.

Flynt Leverett is
professor of international affairs at Penn State. Hillary Mann Leverett is
senior professorial lecturer at American University. Together, they write the
Race for Iran blog. Their new book is Going to Tehran: Why the United States
Needs to Come to Terms With the Islamic Republic of Iran (Metropolitan
Books).

Elie, HK RIP we will for ever love you so very much

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds..." - Samuel Adams

HK For EVER

RIP For Ever a HERO

Elie , RIP !

With tears in their eyes and flowers in their hands people paid tribute to their national hero. Sad at the loss, which can not be compensated yet pride was all over their faces,sacrificed their son of the soil. His was a death for a noble cause of dying for one's own country. Such men are not born everyday, they belong to the rare class of humanity, who are an example in themselves, and they are the ones who set precedents. Mr. Elie HOBEIKA, HK,is an unprecedented Leader, a Hero, and a Legend for ever.